Writing at Centrum

Border Talk: An Interview With Copper Canyon Poet Benjamin Alire Sáenz

A note from interviewer Farid Matuk: 

Former roofer, onion picker, janitor, theologian and Catholic priest, Benjamin Alire Sáenz [pictured] is now a prize winning essayist, novelist, poet, and activist passionately in love with El Paso and its people. I was drawn to his most recent collection of poems, "Elegies in Blue" (Cinco Puntos Press), because it is fundamentally a work about creating communities across boundaries of race, class, region, sexuality, and even history itself–a daring proposition at a time when our sense of a national community is being created at the expense of a hated “other”– an evil doer, a foreigner, a Muslim. For the past several months Sáenz and I have maintained a conversation about poetry and the varied communities in his hometown of El Paso. What follows are excerpts from that correspondence.

Farid Matuk: In your essay, “Notes from The City In Which I Live,” you write, “I am a writer. Somehow, by some great miracle, I have become a possessor of the word. I have learned, that through words, you can gain a small piece of the world.” Did education give you the word, did your family push you to search for it, or did the word find you?

Benjamin Alire Sáenz: I was born in 1954. My parents were not educated and our circumstances were humble, to say the least. Not one house I ever entered while I was growing up had libraries or books. Everyone worked hard, lived from paycheck to paycheck, had too many kids, too many debts, drove cars that were always breaking down. Needless to say, I do not have the same background as a W.H. Auden or a T.S. Eliot. This is not to say that I was not surrounded by civil and intelligent people. The community that taught me language–English and Spanish and Border Talk–that community gave me the word. It pains me to say this but the educational system in this country does not give people “the word.” We cannot use words if we do not know how to think–and that is the one thing that a standardized test cannot measure. And while education can and does open doors, it cannot give you a center from which to critique the dominant discourses and cultures around you.

FM: Where do you ground your work–who do you imagine as your audience or audiences?

One Space Available in Poet Gary Lilley's Workshop

One spot only has opened up in the Gary Lilley poetry workshop, and is the only available space in the sold-out Port Townsend Writers' Conference. To register for this workshop, or to add your name to the mailing list for our other workshops, please call the Centrum registrar at 360.385.3102, x114. 

Gary Lilley is the author of four books: Black Poem, Alpha Zulu, The Reprehensibles, and The Subsequent Blues. Lilley has been a poet-in-residence at WritersCorps, Young Chicago Authors, and The Poetry Center of Chicago, and received the DC Commission on the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. He teaches Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College.

A note from Gary:

"This poetry workshop will be fueled by the premise that truths are more important than facts, and that poems represent the blurring of real experience with those that are completely created. Actual occurrences are the frames, or the skeletons of poems, but a pulse, a layered muscularity, and the presence of fluids, the sparks of the imagined, if you will, give poems the power to walk us down the street into the discovery within situations that we personally have not seen. Too often we are told to write what we know, facts, instead of what we can believe, truths. This workshop will explore tactile and concrete details, syntax and diction, as well as other tools to use in making your poems come alive. It is expected that draft poems will be created daily. This workshop is appropriate for beginning and experienced poets."

Literary Journal Panel Slated for Friday, July 18

For those of you registered for the 2008 Port Townsend Writers' Conference, mark your calendars for Friday, July 18!

Brenda Miller of the Bellingham Review, Sam Ligon of Willow Springs, Natasha Moni and Lana Ayers of the Crab Creek Review, Janet Lucas of Tidepools, and Stephanie Lenox of the online Blood Orange Review will be leading a panel about the most current challenges and opportunities facing literary journals--which are often the rivers that sustain creative writing communities.

Brenda Miller (pictured left), spends the academic year as associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she is the editor-in-chief of the Bellingham Review. Her collection of essays, Season of the Body, was a finalist for the PEN American Center Book Award and she has received a number of Pushcart Prizes for her work. Her essays have appeared in such periodicals as the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Sun.

Sam Ligon (right), editor-in-chief of Willow Springs, received his MA from the University of New Hampshire, and his MFA from New School University. His novel, Safe in Heaven Dead, was published by HarperCollins in 2003, and his short fiction has appeared in many literary journals. He is a recipient of a 2005 Artists Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship.

Natasha Moni, the editor-in-chief of the Crab Creek Review, has published in multiple literary journals. She and fellow editor Lana Ayers will speak about the challenges and opportunities for independent literary journals--journals not connected with a public or private university or other funding source--as well as ideas for getting started, finding grants, and developing the infrastructure to guide independent literary journals.

Janet Lucas, editor-in-chief of Peninsula College's literary journal will offer insights to putting together literary journals without the assitance of graduate or upper-division students. Because Peninsula College is a two-year institution, Tidepools with the assistance and passion of students who are just beginning their academic careers.

Stephanie Lenox, the 2007 winner of the Slapering Hol chapbook contest for her collection of poems, The Heart that Lies Outside the Body, received her MFA degree from the University of Idaho in 2004. She will talk about opportunities strategies for starting, maintaining, and pushing to excellence online publishing.

In Memoriam: Poet Jason Shinder

I would like to mention something about the passing of Jason Shinder. Jason recently passed on after a long battle with cancer. His contribution to the art of writing and the arts in general was vast, purposeful, and I believe will prove lasting, whether it is through his own books, his teaching, or his development of the YMCA National Writer's Voice. I did not know Jason well, but in two or three brief meetings he made me feel as if I had known him a good long time. In his indirect way he taught me things about writing and living deliberately. I have continued to learn from him as I read his poems and his anthologies created as guides for young writers and lovers of the art of poetry.

His life was dedicated to the arts. My first experience with Jason was watching him open up a night of dancing at an MFA residency with utterly compelling moves. This display of quiet excellence echoed itself throughout my time as a student at Bennington. I never had Jason as a teacher, but I was able to witness how, in his quiet way Jason continually worked for art as an artist and teacher. He carried his student’s poems everywhere and worked them over obsessively. I watched him stop in mid-conversation in the student cafe and pull out a student packet, mark it with some notes, stuff it back in his bag and continue his conversation.

He read a series of poems one evening that chronicled his mother’s battle with a terminal illness. The poems were raw, tender, and moving. My final direct interaction with Jason was at a summer residency when he randomly sat down next to me during dinner. I asked him how he was doing. He casually remarked that things were going well, and that he was just trying to write as well as he could. This small bit of conversation became a mantra of teaching advice for me over the next few years. There is so much out there. There is so much to do. We can write poems to make people laugh, chronicle illness, compete with Dante, but no matter what, at the core, we strive to just write as well as we can.

He will be missed.

Searching for the Heart of Africa

[Chris Abani gives a talk at the TED conference in Monterrey, Calif.]

In this video, novelist Chris Abani talks about the search to create an African narrative. This summer, Abani will be giving a reading and a lecture as part of the Port Townsend Writers' Conference. The lecture will take place Monday, July 14 at 4 pm at the Joseph F. Wheeler Theater, and the reading will take place Friday evening, July 18, at 7:30 pm, also at the Wheeler. All readings and lectures are free.